When Google started it was hyped by the MSM but offered nothing different from its competitors.
I can't remember any Google hype before 2001 or so. The first article I read in 1998 or so was in Wired Magazine. The article was about the size of a tamagochi display and rather sceptical about the prospects.
Wired ran its own popular search engine named hotbot, which was what I used most of the time. Before hotbot, all search engines more or less sucked, especially for ego-surfing, because it took three months or longer before you could admire your own beloved articles in search results. (The then still popular Altavista used a single computer with 6 GB (= A LOT) as search engine and server.)
By late 1999 google searched 800 million webpages, but alltheweb.com and northernlight.com searched more and found more sooner, with northerlight promising a searchable OCR archive of every newspaper article since the 1700s but did not deliver.
Pagerank had no visible benefit during that era. In contrast to northernlight and alltheweb, google could not do stemming, i.e. "aviator" and "aviators" were different terms and matched exactly. Not much of a problem for English, but a big problem for most other languages. Nothernlight and alltheweb did do stemming and had a menu for limiting queries to a certain language. At that time, most nerds in my environment used alltheweb and northernlight; normies used MSN and yahoo.
Google had only one advantage when compared to alltheweb an northernlight and that was 150 million dollars of In-Q-Tel funding. Alltheweb and northernlight were not actually in the search business but IT consultants or something, both selling indexers for large companies to use inhouse, among other things. For them, a search engine was a loss-leader and cheap advertising.
The Chinese were blocking google-bots at first, btw., but not Northernlight or Alltheweb. Not for access by Chinese, mind you, but for indexing by what they presumed was the CIA. The Chinese government got Google's number, as did Vladimir Putin, or so it seems.
I can't remember any Google hype before 2001 or so. The first article I read in 1998 or so was in Wired Magazine. The article was about the size of a tamagochi display and rather sceptical about the prospects.
Wired ran its own popular search engine named hotbot, which was what I used most of the time. Before hotbot, all search engines more or less sucked, especially for ego-surfing, because it took three months or longer before you could admire your own beloved articles in search results. (The then still popular Altavista used a single computer with 6 GB (= A LOT) as search engine and server.)
By late 1999 google searched 800 million webpages, but alltheweb.com and northernlight.com searched more and found more sooner, with northerlight promising a searchable OCR archive of every newspaper article since the 1700s but did not deliver.
Pagerank had no visible benefit during that era. In contrast to northernlight and alltheweb, google could not do stemming, i.e. "aviator" and "aviators" were different terms and matched exactly. Not much of a problem for English, but a big problem for most other languages. Nothernlight and alltheweb did do stemming and had a menu for limiting queries to a certain language. At that time, most nerds in my environment used alltheweb and northernlight; normies used MSN and yahoo.
Google had only one advantage when compared to alltheweb an northernlight and that was 150 million dollars of In-Q-Tel funding. Alltheweb and northernlight were not actually in the search business but IT consultants or something, both selling indexers for large companies to use inhouse, among other things. For them, a search engine was a loss-leader and cheap advertising.
The Chinese were blocking google-bots at first, btw., but not Northernlight or Alltheweb. Not for access by Chinese, mind you, but for indexing by what they presumed was the CIA. The Chinese government got Google's number, as did Vladimir Putin, or so it seems.